All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.
Edgar Allan Poe

I have no faith in human perfectability. I think that human exertion will have no appreciable effect upon humanity. Man is now only more active - not more happy - nor more wise, than he was 6000 years ago.
Edgar Allan Poe

Words have no power to impress the mind without the exquisite horror of their reality.
Edgar Allan Poe

The true genius shudders at incompleteness - and usually prefers silence to saying something which is not everything it should be.
Edgar Allan Poe

Science has not yet taught us if madness is or is not the sublimity of the intelligence.
Edgar Allan Poe

They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.
Edgar Allan Poe

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary.
Edgar Allan Poe

Stupidity is a talent for misconception.
Edgar Allan Poe

I am above the weakness of seeking to establish a sequence of cause and effect, between the disaster and the atrocity.
Edgar Allan Poe

Poetry is the rhythmical creation of beauty in words.
Edgar Allan Poe

Man's real life is happy, chiefly because he is ever expecting that it soon will be so.
Edgar Allan Poe

The death of a beautiful woman, is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world.
Edgar Allan Poe

Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term Art, I should call it 'the reproduction of what the Senses perceive in Nature through the veil of the soul.' The mere imitation, however accurate, of what is in Nature, entitles no man to the sacred name of 'Artist.'
Edgar Allan Poe

In criticism I will be bold, and as sternly, absolutely just with friend and foe. From this purpose nothing shall turn me.
Edgar Allan Poe

Experience has shown, and a true philosophy will always show, that a vast, perhaps the larger portion of the truth arises from the seemingly irrelevant.
Edgar Allan Poe